A word about artificial.

Recently I sat in the lobby of a hotel waiting for my wife to join me for breakfast. As I sat watching people walk by, I noticed a sign that had been placed next to my seating area in what looked like a landscaped garden. The sign read, These are artificial plants, enjoy them, but please don’t water. As I sat there thinking, at first I wondered why that sign was necessary. Those aren’t real plants. Why would anyone water them? But then it occurred to me, those plants are real. They’re just artificial. Sometimes artificial gets confused with real. I once had an artificial plant sitting on top of my office bookcase. It was green, had leaves. It sat in a nice-looking plastic pot. From across the room, it looked reasonably convincing. And it was most definitely real. It was just artificial. It didn’t need water. It never outgrew that plastic pot. I never certainly had to prune it. It looked very much alive. You know what? It was it was artificial. We live in a world increasingly filled with useful things that we fashion ourselves. Artificial flowers, artificial grass. My wife even has artificial tears that she has to put in her eyes. And of course, artificial intelligence is everywhere we look. The word artificial doesn’t mean false or useless. An artificial limb can help a person walk. Artificial tears, like my wife has to use, can bring some help to her dry eyes. Artificial intelligence can gather information, organize ideas, answer questions, even help us find words when our own words are difficult to locate. No, artificial things can be real, they can be useful, they can even be remarkable, but they’re not alive. Artificial intelligence can gather information about love. But you know what? It can’t love. It can compose a prayer, but it cannot pray. It can explain grief, but AI cannot grieve. It can quote the words of Jesus, but it cannot follow him. And that distinction matters. The Bible never treats life as merely the appearance of life. Scripture describes life as something that comes from God Himself. In Genesis, God formed man from the dust of the ground. Adam looked just like a man, but he wasn’t a man with a living soul until God breathed into him the breath of life. An artificial heart-lung machine may pump our blood to keep us alive, but it will never give us life. Jesus said, I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly. Our walk with Jesus is not simply learning how to imitate the behavior of Jesus. It’s not artificial goodness attached to the outside of a human life. It’s the life of Jesus Christ at work within us. Paul identified the fruit of the Spirit this way: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. No AI can replicate that. Artificial intelligence may help us care for people, might remind us to take our medicine or answer our questions or encourage us when we’re discouraged and tell us exactly what we need to hear. But caring for someone is not the same as caring about them. To care about another person’s sorrow, I don’t need artificial tears. I need to sense and know the sorrow of their life within my own. It is to rejoice when they rejoice and weep when they weep. It is to love, as John wrote, not in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. That remains the sacred work of a redeemed and living soul inhabited by the living Christ. Artificial can imitate the appearance of life. Artificial is real. It can even be astonishingly realistic. But only Christ’s living life in me can love. And only that kind of love can bear fruit that God says will last.